Miniature frog

A new species of miniature frog has been found by Japanese biologist in the Malaysian part of Borneo Island. The new species is named as Microhyla Malang by Masafumi Matsui, who has been conducting fieldwork in Borneo. Microhyla has narrow-mouth described by Matsui which has been reported in the latest edition of the academic journal Zootaxa. Microhyla resides in the western part of Sarawak state and Sabah state.

Matsui while refuting the discovery of a pea-size new species last year that was billed as "the Old World's smallest frog," according to a recently published scientific paper. In that report, he given detailed scientific evidence to cancel the widely reported finding of the Old World's smallest frog, named M. nepenthicola, viewing that it is in reality M. borneensis, a previously described species of Microhyla frog has unique habit of breeding in pitcher plants on the forest floor.






Matsui said M. Malang and M. Borneensis, are very similar in appearance but can be distinguished by body size, color pattern and extent of toe webbing. Previous year, Indraneil Das, a Malaysian scientist at University Malaysia Sarawak, and his German colleague, Alexander Haas from Hamburg University's Zoological Museum, published a paper in Zootaxa in which they explained the smaller form of what had long been regarded by taxonomists as M. Borneensis as a new species, considering the larger form to be true M. Borneensis.